Follow the author of this article

It is hard to know what to do when you first arrive in Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border at sunset. Part of me wanted to gawp like an idiot — in fact, like one of those idiots in cowboy films, who chew tobacco and have their mouth wide open while drawling “You don’t say”.

I stayed over for a night at The View hotel, and was very happy to stay in and watch a John Ford western on my telly – the hotel had a good DVD library – comparing the camera angle with my own view of the real thing as the sun slipped away beyond the spires and buttes.

But early the next morning, I did what a hiker’s gotta do: I filled a flask with water, put on some boots and sunblock and set out for the 3.2-mile Wildcat Trail. At an elevation of about 5,400ft (1,645m), it is the only self-guided route in the park, which is owned and run by the Navajo. It was a dry cold morning and I felt like a lone ranger when I left the visitor centre where the trail begins.

The West Mitten Butte (Alamy)

I followed a gently sloping hillside of parched dusty earth, always orange but now a deep Martian red. The path was clear, with low cairns spaced out along the way and small cactuses and tough-looking bushes and spiky bursts of yucca marking its edges.

The atmosphere was clear, too, with zero pollution, and everything looked within touching distance. There was West Mitten Butte directly ahead, with East Mitten Butte and Merrick Butte just beyond; on my left was the wide, flat-topped Sentinel Mesa, its wall rippled with shadows.

I veered to the south-east, following the dry bed of a river — used by resident Navajo as a road — and soon found myself standing on flat open ground with a view towards a series of huge “monuments” with evocative names such as Big Indian, Saddleback and Castle Rock.

Overview of Navajo Tribal Park (Alamy)

I began to circle West Mitten Butte, which revealed itself to be thinner than it looked face on. Like its sister East Mitten Butte, it has a long separate finger-like stack on one side. Even in the surreal fantasy that is Monument Valley, these two formations are distinctive, which accounts for their appearance in a zillion holiday snaps and also in films such as Stagecoach and Once Upon a Time in the West.

When I was beneath the butte, it seemed to take on a slightly spooky presence. The ancient Navajo placed their gods in these mountains. But it was equally moving to think of all the time and weather that has passed to calve these siltstone and sand mountains out of what was once an amorphous sedimentary massif.

I followed another sandy stream bed and then climbed a little way to arrive back at my starting point — I had walked only a touch over three miles, but had been wandering, time-free, for more than two hours.

I later hooked up with a Navajo guide for an escorted Jeep drive deep into the national park, with stops for short walks, petroglyphs and some lunch in the cool shadow of a canyon – and it was also wonderful. But there is nothing like an early-morning walk in the Max Ernst landscape of Monument Valley, all alone — like the best cowboys – with only the rising sun for company.